Yet Another GitHub Profile Generator | Hacker News Reader

Yet Another GitHub Profile Generator

blog.urth.org

83 pointslukastyrychtr23 comments

> I wrote it in Rust. Is Rust the best language for this? Yes, because I want to learn more Rust.

I love this sentiment. Sometimes it's fun to use the "wrong" thing for something, or because it's all you know or care to use. Goes to show there's never really a "correct" language to do something in - just perhaps an atypical one.

That's not really about right vs wrong. That's about having a goal and trying to meet that goal. The goal here was to learn Rust, so using Rust to write [whatever] in makes perfect sense for that goal. When I learned to look this way in all things, basically everything in life started to appear differently to me.

I wish GitHub had a better way of distinguishing repositories (all the random experimental repos I've created or repos I've forked for the purpose of making a small contribution, sorted by last modified time) that show up on the profile page from "projects" (repos I'd want people to check out if they're interested in seeing what I've worked on). Pinned repos help with this, but the arbitrary limit of 6 pinned repos is a challenge. I'd prefer it if I could keep my public repositories unlisted and only list pinned repos.

I'm using a self-contained profile generator powered by GitHub actions, similar to the one in this blog post, to work around the pinned repo limit and add a bit of extra organization on the profile page: https://github.com/anishathalye/anishathalye/blob/master/gen...

> I wish GitHub had a better way of distinguishing repositories … from "projects" (repos I'd want people to check out if they're interested in seeing what I've worked on).

GH doesnt do this because they want to be “social” and, because most people don’t actually contribute to a large number of other projects, this helps beef up peoples’ profiles.

I agree with you that this creates a lot of chaff (I almost typed “spam“) in your profile. It’s dumb that some random library I once submitted a fix to (via a PR) will sit around.

I suppose the saving graces are this causes you to write a little narrative on your profile page, and also does show hippy he breadth of your interests and experiences.

But the urge to make everything some kind of social network experience is a pain.

>that some random library I once submitted a fix

You can always delete the repo when you're done.

That’s what I eventually do once I’ve noticed the fix has gone in.

Yes, I try to do this, but it's extra effort to remember. I usually try to clean up my public repositories once every couple of months.

> It’s dumb that some random library I once submitted a fix to (via a PR) will sit around.

For these at least GitHub will tell you that the repo is a fork in the data available from their APIs.

I made this https://caub.github.io/github-clean-forks/ for cleaning up old forks

You can also use Github orgs for organising repos. Nothing stops you from putting all the forks into a "anishathalyes-forked-repos" org with no members.

I've thought about doing that, but I find the "Merge branch 'anishathalye-forked-repos/...'" that appears when people click the merge button on GitHub unattractive.

I don't think people pay attention to that usually. I don't care what whoever created PR called their branch.

If you called it anishathalye-contributions it would seem fairly friendly to me.

Nice profile!

I agree that it'd be nice to be able to add some more metadata to repos. Here's a relatively ridiculous idea ... You could simply add a `REPO_META.JSON` file to some or all of your repos then a profile generator could just grab all of those. But keeping those up to date would become its own chore soon enough.

With my profile generator I tried to pick the most relevant to highlight by filtering out forks and then showing things with recent commits. Those are the most likely to be something I want people to see, as opposed to repos with experiments I last committed to 10 years ago.

Wow, I had no idea I could add MD to my github profile. That's really cool.

I created a silly little tool to spice up your github contribution graph a while back. I don't know if I ever even posted it to HN, but this thread seems relevant:

https://ben174.github.io/busy-boy/

> Wow, I had no idea I could add MD to my github profile. That's really cool.

Gitlab can also do this.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/profile/#add-details-to-your...

Ok?

This is my blog post. I'm happy to answer any questions folks might have.

I've actually revised the code a fair bit since this post. There were some bugs where it was missing some repos. Retrieving all the right data via the GitHub GraphQL API is tricky to get right.

This is such a cool feature, mine is updated by a Pi, pulls sensor data from a couple of projects (solar cell/anemometer) and updates it everyday.

It's funny I have a database with about 9.5 million rows so far of milliwatt power generated recordings from the anemometer (it records every second).

You can see the music that I'm listening on my GitHub profile.

Hmm, now I'm wondering if I should add that too ...

No disrespect to the author or their project but the "profile READMEs" and other social features bolted on to GitHub in the past few years are a load of crap. When I visit someone's profile, I don't care who they are or what ever page long ramble they have to say. I just want to see their code. IDGAF about their ratio of PRs to Issues either or their "achievements". We're here to bloody write code not jerk each other off.

I wish they would stop trying to turn it into a social network.

I'm the author, and if you look at my profile (https://github.com/autarch) you'll see that it links to a bunch of repos. In fact, one of the main reasons I wrote this profile generator was because I wanted an automated process that would always show people the most relevant repos.

The useless (but fun for me) stats are intentionally at the bottom.

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